Why and how did Ansett manage to go bankrupt after the Olympic games in Sydney? I was looking at some of the cabin photos of them tonight and I began to wonder how exactly they went under. Did they have a bad business plan? Was there only ment to be 1 Major INTL carrier of Australia? I think they are one of the airlines that really have never been mentioned since going under. How long were they around too?

NZers get ready, we're just about not long from getting verbally smashed.
Wdleiser-Ansett went under for many reasons and I am sure that the people replying after me will be more than happy to fill you in. (I am not too sure of the exact cause but I have an idea after reading the threads on here)

AN was founded in 1935 with first flight from Hamilton (in western Victoria) to Melbourne in 1936, so a very old airline indeed. As stated, they went under for a number of reasons, including:

- Inept management
- Inability to capitalise on the Sydney 2000 games (the majority of Australians and visitors at the time thought that Qantas was the official carrier as QF had very successfully gotten many Olympic stars on board for advertising and promotion)
- Debatable Australian government favouritism towards QF with regards to route authorisation etc.
- This will surely illicit debate: NZ take-over blocking SQ money, something AN desperately needed for fleet expansion. One only has to look at the financial state NZ was in at the time, and almost immediately after, to see that although this may have looked good from an NZ perspective, it was one of the worst case scenarios from an AN perspective.
- The arrival of DJ and Impulse on the scene, and the ensueing price war. AN wasn't able to sustain discounting like QF was, as AN could not rely on raking in profits earnt in US dollars.

Wdleiser ... like our friends from NZ said above, this is a can of worms best left WELL ALONE, which flares up on A.net from time to time. We all agree to disagree, and I think we're all sick to death of it.

Take it from one who lost 275,000-odd FFP's and about as much again in reward flights booked but lost, including what would have been our family holiday at end-2001...there's such a large cast of players in the killing of Ansett, it is amazing to think that there were just 3 relativley small countries (population-wise) involved, i.e. Aust., NZ & S'pore, with more than enough blame to go around. This wasn't so much a whodunnit story, as a whodidn'tdoit!

Despite this, we still chose to go on holiday to NZ last year! Forgive & forget, I suppose.

Anyway, this is such a hot topic, there are at least 2 quite hefty books on the subject. 1) Ansett: The Murder of an Airline and 2) Ansett, The Collapse. You can find both listed in the mailorder sections of Airways and/or Airliners magazines in the US as well as Airliner World, UK. There may also be a 3rd book around I think.

At T2 the former Ansett terminal at Sydney there are now 1.25 times the number of Ansett passengers using half the available gates (or thereabouts depends how you deal with the hard stands) through Virgin Blue, which has half the turnaround time and makes almost an infinitely greater amount of money than AN since AN actually didn't make any money at all during most of its dying decade. (The books were cooked, as revealed in discoveries Qantas and SQ made when they examined the books in the final week before both refused to buy it for one dollar.)

The people flying on Virgin Blue are paying about one fifth the average fares they paid before Ansett was cut adrift by the absolutely brilliant owners at Air New Zealand who left it without a CEO for almost a year after Rod Eddington shot through to BA.

In the other wing of T2 you will find Jetstar, not actually making much money at the moment and costing Qantas a lot, but time will tell, and some Qantaslink flights plus REX, the small turboprop operator.

The situation fills me with mixed emotions. Immense sadness at the misery caused to people I knew well at Ansett, serious anger at the failings of their management (when they had one) both pre and post NZ ownership, but admiration for the new situation, where fares are low and seriously good money is being made by almost all.

Hi Wdleiser ... the FFP's were useless - pointless ??? - from the moment AN went down. As said above, no other Star carrier wanted to touch them. Have a look at the thread dealing with this about 10-14 days ago. You will most likely find the same thing happening if UA, US or any other "major" goes belly-up.

All that happened was that a) any trips booked using points on other Star a/l's were to be honoured till dec. 31st that year (2001) , remembering that AN went bust officially on 12 Sept., so big deal really - and b) UA came along and offered to enroll former ANFF's into MilagePlus at the status level they had had w. AN.

To put it simply AN was dying for along time before. Then NZ got greedy and decided to block SQ from buying News Limiteds share. By doing this NZ practically ensured that their fate was going to be the same as AN's but NZ got lucky where AN didn't and got bailed out by the new zealand government while AN got left to sink. by this point SQ was no longer intersted in buying AN. All over red rover.